


Born to Die

by hedyrome



Series: I Fall to Pieces (When I'm With You) [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Cliche, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, Slow Burn, Spy OCs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-19 07:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19970512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedyrome/pseuds/hedyrome
Summary: Natalia is on the run yet again. After the loss of her old life and the slight semblance of a new one she could've made for herself in Berlin, she's made a vow to herself to not let anyone else get close to her anymore, to save herself the heartache. Her world is confined to the run-down diner where she works and the dive bar she drowns her sorrows in in rural Romania. However, her promises begin coming unraveled after an encounter with a certain Bucky Barnes that only sheer luck could have brought about. As Natalia grapples with her fear of being the cause of another person's death and the simultaneous pull she feels towards this stranger, her story continues.





	1. Talking 'Bout That Newer Nation

“So, what’s your name?”

“My name?

“That’s what I asked, wasn’t it?” 

“I’m Bucky. Bucky Barnes.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you Mr. Barnes. I’m Natalia Hayes.”

I didn’t know at the time that a simple, slightly forced exchange of names would spur a series of events that would change my life forever. Metaphorically, I died and was reborn at the hands of a Romanian bartender. Now I wasn’t ‘Natalia the Spy’ or ‘Agent Natalia’, I was simply Natalia Hayes, a waitress (and possibly an alcoholic, but we can leave that fact off the record). It felt good to have some sense of normalcy. Of course, my colorful past and penchant for getting the people I care about killed dampened my ability to fully enjoy this new life that I had made for myself. 

I hadn’t seen the enigmatic Mr. Barnes in five days, and while I played it off as a good thing, that one less person would be getting hurt when I was inevitably assassinated, deep down I was disappointed. In that simple conversation, I had learned something about myself. I had been so caught up in discretion, and work, and, yes, the bottom of multiple shot glasses, to realize that deep down, I was empty. The fact that simply telling someone my name and sharing a few drinks with them was the most real social interaction I’ve gotten in months aside from formalities from a bartender and profanity-laced tirades from angry customers was a jarring thing to realize. I had a funny feeling in my stomach all night, which I had attributed to the beer. When I was walking home, though, I realized what that emotion was. I felt it after I finished a mission, when I drank a coffee as Elina shared some wild story about one of her many love interests, and when I was with Elizabeth…it was happiness. Fulfillment. 

On the sixth night, I followed my simple routine. Wake up, go to work, and then drink so much I would finally be able to get a few hours of sleep before my nightmares forced me awake again. By now, I had given up all hope of the man ever returning. Still though, as soon as I stepped into the dark bar, I scanned the place for a well-built man clad in sunglasses and a baseball cap. Andrei, it seemed, had picked up on my little habit much earlier in the week.

“So, Natalia… are you… looking for someone? A muscular American man, perhaps?”

“Way to be subtle, Andrei,” I deadpanned.

“But you’re not answering the question,” he said, drawing out the word question in a sing song voice.

“I’m actually surveying the perimeter. Making sure there aren’t any threats,” I said jokingly, knowing deep down that while that’s what I should’ve been doing, I was instead looking for my one-time drinking partner.

“Uh huh. Beer again?”

“Yes please.”

I was bringing the bottle up to my lips when suddenly the bell above the old, wooden door rang. I snapped my head to the entrance so fast that I knocked the beer with my face, effectively spilling a good portion of it on my shirt.

“Ugh,” I mumbled. Instead of further concerning myself with whoever just walked into the bar, I began to attempt cleaning the beer off my shirt. I was in the middle of uselessly scrubbing my shirt with a brown napkin when a man cleared his throat beside me. My heart stopped in its chest, and when I turned around to look at the man it felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Sure enough, Bucky Barnes, in all his secretive businessman glory, was leaning on the bar, looking at me. I stared at him for a bit. I think he stared back, but it was too difficult to see his eyes. Curse those sunglasses. Seeing that I was a little preoccupied, he spoke first.

“Is this seat taken?”

“Nope.”

I did a quick look around the room. The bar was always busy on Friday nights, but by no means was the stool right next to me the only place in the whole joint to sit down in.  
We sat in an uncomfortable silence for a while, until the very man who forced us together in the first place, Andrei, decided to make a very loud appearance.

“Bucky! It’s good to see you, my friend!”

He let out a light laugh “Good to see you too, Andrei.”

“What do you want to drink?”

“I’ll have two beers. And put Natalia’s on my tab.”

I looked at him questioningly, furrowing my eyebrows and tilting my head slightly.

“Why are you buying my drink?” I asked, sounding more suspicious than I had hoped to. I was really losing my touch. All my training was being unraveled by a few months abroad and out of practice.

“I’m the reason you spilt it, aren’t I?” He said smoothly.

Scrambling to find an answer that didn’t just scream ‘I desperately crave a normal social life and being with you for fifteen minutes reminded me how much I missed having friends,’ so I decided to fake my way out of the potential embarrassment, as one does.

“Hey, just like I told Andrei, I’m keeping an eye out for potential threats! If I need to dropkick someone, I’ll be ready.” 

“Uh huh, sure,” Bucky said sarcastically, following up his comment with a long drink of beer. When he finished, he wiped his mouth and handed me the leather jacket he had draped across the back of the crumbling wooden stool.

“What’s this for? Do you need me to hold it while you start a bar fight?” I said jokingly.

“No, it’s ‘cause your shirt’s see through right now.”

“Oh my God,” I said, completely mortified. Instead of changing out of the white blouse and black slacks that made up my work uniform at my actual workplace, I had just come straight to Andrei’s. All my childhood nightmares of being practically naked when I needed to do a school presentation had come to life. 

“I’m so, so, so sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. It happens to the best of us. Why do you think I always wear dark clothes?”

He phrased his statement lightheartedly, which made me give an awkward chuckle that could be better described as a half laugh. Desperate to change the topic of the conversation to literally anything but what it was right now, I brought up the only thing I knew about Bucky.

“So… Andrei tells me that you’re from Brooklyn?”

For a millisecond, he seemed caught off guard by my question. He probably lived as alone as I did and didn’t have many people interested in his life story.

“Yeah, I am. How about you?”

“Brooklyn as well.”

“Huh. Small world.”

“Definitely.”

We fell into a comfortable silence, finishing our drinks and simply enjoying each other’s company. I nearly had a heart attack when I looked at the clock and saw that I only had six hours until my shift started.

“Listen, Bucky, I had a lot of fun, and we should totally do this again, but I’ve gotta get some shut eye before work starts. Here’s your jacket back.” As I was unbuttoning his jacket, he put a hand up to stop me.

“Keep it. You can give it back to me tomorrow. Same place, same time?”

I broke into an uncharacteristically wide smile.

“Okay, Bucky. I’ll see you tomorrow.”


	2. Crying Tears of Gold Like Lemonade

In the new, quiet life I had made for myself, I learned quickly that it was the small things, the simplest of life’s pleasures, that really were the reasons I had to keep going. On days when all I wanted to do was lie on the air mattress in my barren apartment and wither away, I would ask myself some questions.

I had woken up bright and early at four thirty in the morning, giving me an hour and a half to get ready and head for work. It was one of those days where you know as soon as you open your eyes that you’re going to loathe every second you collapse twelve hours later from exhaustion (or often in my case, alcohol consumption). When my alarm went off, filling by apartment with sounds so loud they could almost be considered obnoxious, my eyes snapped open, and I instantly rolled them. I slammed my hand down on my alarm, effectively shutting it up. Free of the constant beeping, I rubbed my eyes with my hands. I could feel a migraine coming on and was half tempted to stay in bed and die there. So instead of soaking in the pool of dramatics I had created for myself, I began running down my list of questions.

_Who will water your houseplants?_

I messily get out of bed, yawn, rub my eyes one last time, and shuffle to my bathroom

_Who will give water and food to the stray cats every night?_

I look into the mirror and blink a few times, taking in my appearance. If the wild mess of hair hastily piled around my head and the dark circles underneath my eyes didn’t give away how far I’d fallen since my escape from the organization, the sheer amount of tiredness in my expression did.

_Who would give that nice old man his coffee every morning? Who would chat with him?_

After brushing my teeth and taming my hair, I walked back into my room and opened the faded white, wooden door of my closet. “What kind of person do I want to be today?” I asked myself quietly, as my eyes flicked between the three wigs I had bought since I fled Berlin. After settling on one, I got dressed. Skipping breakfast and beginning to pack my bag, I paused. What would my job do if I just… stopped showing up? Would they care, or would they just hang up their hiring sign again? Whenever my thoughts went this dark, I’d ask myself another question.

_What about Bucky’s jacket?_

Before walking out of the creaky front door to my apartment, I stopped, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and gave myself time to reflect on everything I had asked myself. Who would water my houseplants, or give food and water to the stray cats, or chat with the nice old man in the diner every morning? Who would return Bucky’s leather jacket? I would. When the going got tough, I did what my therapist back in Brooklyn told me to do: I examined my place in the lives of others. I was the reason that my houseplants didn’t die, that the stray cats weren’t malnourished, that the old man wasn’t all alone drinking plain black coffee, and that Bucky wasn’t nursing a beer, waiting for me to show up with his jacket.

Armed with a newfound sense of optimism and my handgun tucked away in a hidden pocket in my backpack, I set out into the quiet streets, walking to the diner with a small smile, which elicited reactions from my coworkers.

“What’s gotten into you today?” My manager, a man whose name I never bothered to learn, and only existed to sign my paycheck, questioned.

“Oh, you know, just excited to meet a friend tonight.” I tried to play it off as cool, but the abnormally optimistic expression that had seemingly found its permanent residence on my face betrayed my true emotions.

“Whatever it is, keep that attitude during your shift!”

As I set my things down in the near closet sized room that the diner had declared an employee break room, I wondered to myself how long this would last. How long until the candle would burn out? When would these questions become obsolete? I’m alone in a foreign country, devoid of my medications, on the run, and facing an inevitably gruesome end… but that was all trauma I could deal with in the early hours in the morning, as I stare at my broken ceiling fan and slowly drift off onto a short lived, but badly needed,  
slumber. Now though, it was time to work.

After eight grueling hours on my feet, dealing with incessant complaints from customers, and burning my hands on blistering plates, I was in desperate need of a drink. After making sure to change out of my work uniform, I shouldered my bag and draped Bucky’s jacket over my arm and began the trek to the bar.

When I entered the bar, Bucky was already sitting where he had sat the past two times we had talked, still clad in his mysterious sunglasses and baseball cap. It was a Saturday night, meaning that the place was at maximum capacity. From what I could make out in the dark, smoky room, every seat was taken, except for my usual stool at the left corner of the bar. At hearing the chime of the hanging bell, Bucky had turned, and upon seeing that it was me, raised up his right hand and waved me over. I gave a small smile and began to make my way through the small groups of drunken patrons that stood in the way of the door and my seat.

Finally reaching the bar, I gave Bucky’s jacket to him and took my seat. After watching me wave Andrei over and order a drink, he spoke.

“Thanks for returning this,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the jacket now hanging off the corner of the back of the stool.

“No problem,” I replied, shrugging my shoulders. “Thanks for letting me borrow it in the first place.”

“It’s nothin’, you looked like you needed it.”

“I had the situation under control, Barnes,” I said with an air of joking authority.

“Is that your thing?”

I turned my head, looking at him questioningly. “Is what my thing?”

“Pretending to be a spy?”

“Ha, very funny,” I said sarcastically. All my suspicions about this man had been wrong. If he thinks that James Bond-speak is how spies talk, then he really was not in my field of business. Unless he was lying? I pushed that thought away. Old habits die hard, but I would have to change my untrust of everyone that wasn’t myself in order to have the social live I desire.

“I’m being serious! First, you’re all ‘I definitely wasn’t looking for you, Bucky, I was just looking for threats,’ and now you’re talking like a shady villain from a bad movie?”

I shrugged and took a sip from my bottle before replying. “Awfully bold accusations coming from a man whose only recognizable trait is a cap and glasses. Tell me, Bucky, what color even are your eyes?”

He straightened his posture and steeled his expression. “That’s classified information, agent.”

I rolled my eyes.

“You can’t come for my hat and glasses when you wear wigs every day. What color even is your hair?”

“You said it yourself, that’s classified information.”

After a moment of silence, we both burst out into laughter.

After we both had quieted down, I decided to ask what had been on my mind since I had seen him first walk into the bar. “In all realness, what do you do for a living? I mean, what job requires that level of discretion?” I knew exactly what job required extensive discretion, and I knew exactly what answer he was going to give if he worked that job.

“I uh, I work with my friends.”

“Oh? And what work do you and your friends do?”

“We work in politics. We were big in the whole Sokovia Accord debacle a few months ago. After the king of Wakanda got killed, we got in a huge argument with some other politicians. We’ve had to keep our heads down for a bit.”

So, he most likely wasn’t going to try and kill me in the name of a conglomerate of spies and assassins. That was reassuring.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a waitress.”

“Where at?”

“The diner, about five blocks away.”

“I know that place. I might just have to swing by and come see you sometime.”

“And I’ll tell everyone else that I’ve never met this man in my life.”

All night long, we talked about everything from food to music to politics. For those few hours, I felt like maybe I had a shot at an average life. A job, a place to drink, and after tonight, a friend. I felt warm inside, and this time it wasn’t due to the few sips of beer I had had that night. It was because after all these months of running, hiding, isolating myself, and drowning my problems in oceans full of cheap liquor, I had finally found something that made me feel the closest thing to happiness that I have in a long, long time. Of course, knowing how God is a vicious, two-faced prick, all of the good I had created for myself just had to go to shit.


End file.
